Why is no one, not rank and file GOP members, or the RNC leadership, or the conservative blogosphere, or talk radio, challenging the Constitutionality of HR 3200? We should be screaming from the rooftops every day the fact that the Constitution does NOT give unlimited authority to Congress to spend tax money on social welfare programs, or even a limited authority. Time and again, throughout our history, charity funded by the public coffers has been struck down, either before its passage by wise Congressmen or after in the courts. As a reminder, I offer up the following:
"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America." - James Madison
“I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity.” To approve the measure "would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.” - Franklin Pierce
“Mr. Speaker: I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the suffering of the living, if there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has not the power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member on this floor knows it. We have the right as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.” - David Crockett
And, irony of ironies:
"As a matter of fact and law, the governing rights of the States are all of those which have not been surrendered to the National Government by the Constitution or its amendments. Wisely or unwisely, people know that under the Eighteenth Amendment Congress has been given the right to legislate on this particular subject, but this is not the case in the matter of a great number of other vital problems of government, such as the conduct of public utilities, of banks, of insurance, of business, of agriculture, of education, of social welfare and of a dozen other important features. In these, Washington must not be encouraged to interfere." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt
HR 3200 is not Constitutional. In truth, neither is Cap and Tax, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and the vast array of alphabet soup federal agencies. Follow the Constitution.
